Friday 27 July 2012 19.10 EDT
First published on Friday 27 July 2012 19.10 EDT

Watching Danny Boyle's £27m spectacular, I was reminded of an old rhyme about a famous director of Hollywood epics. It ran "Cecil B DeMille rather against his will, Was persuaded to leave Moses out of the Wars of the Roses." In other words, in trying to give us a potted, panoramic vision of Britain past, present and future, Boyle seemed to throw in everything bar the kitchen sink. Logistically, the show was a triumph. Imaginatively, it left something to be desired.

Like Boyle's National Theatre production of Frankenstein, it began with the sounding of a giant bell. And I liked the opening image of a lost vision of pastoral England: a place of shire horses, sheep and cows, Maypole dancing, home-baking and cricket on the village green. The shattering of that dream by the industrial revolution was also accomplished with great flair. Suddenly the arena was turned into a place of belching smoke-stacks, satanic mills and oppressed workers toiling away like Wagnerian Nibelungen.

Even if the sight of Kenneth Branagh dressed as a frock-coated Isambard Kingdom Brunel reading Caliban's "the isle is full of noises" speech from The Tempest was a bit bizarre, Boyle revealed in that vision of industrial pandemonium his great capacity for spectacle.

But the sheer pressure to cram so much into under two hours led to some strange shifts of tone. One minute we were being asked to commemorate the dead of two world wars: the next we were confronted by massed ranks of Beatles lookalikes all clad in kitsch military uniforms from the Sergeant Pepper cover. And this mixture of reverence and irreverence pervaded the whole evening. Admirable as it may have been to commemorate those who died in the London bombings of 2005, it was a bit hard to switch to that from the jaunty mood of celebration created by a multi-media montage of pop music of the last 50 years.

Even the show's frequent attempts at cheeky humour had a variable effect. I thought the idea of Daniel Craig's 007 marching through Buckingham Palace, and carefully dodging the corgis, in order to escort the Queen to the ceremony had a brilliant payoff worthy of Barry Humphries: namely, the sight of the Queen apparently parachuting into the Olympic Stadium. But the protracted joke of Rowan Atkinson's Mr Bean indulging in sporting fantasies while performing with the LSO in the Chariots of Fire theme was awful. I swear I've seen Atkinson do that routine of the bored instrumentalist before. It also made Sir Simon Rattle and the LSO look like a bunch of stooges.

In short, this was a mixed evening. Some parts of the opening ceremony were simply astonishing. The forging of the interlocking Olympic rings which then hovered over the stadium in the night-sky was a visual coup. The celebration of the NHS, through a phalanx of volunteer nurses, was also a nice poke in the eye for Cameron and the coalition government. And the section devoted to children's literature led to an impressive mix of the disturbing, such as the Child Catcher from Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, and the reassuring, such as the sight of multiple Mary Poppinses with illuminated umbrellas.

But, in the end, I'm not sure what the evening had to tell us about the "isle of wonder" it was celebrating. It told us that we had a rurally romantic past destroyed by the blight of industrialism and that we are now living in a world of instant communication and limitless digital possibilities. It also told us that modern Britain is a jaunty place that laughs at pomp and ceremony but still has a residual affection for institutions like royalty. But there was scant acknowledgement of our great literary and scientific achievements and I never felt the ideas quite matched the visual flair. Technically, however, it seemed to go without a hitch and, if nothing else, it provided a cheery, mercifully unstuffy prelude to the serious business of the Games themselves.